For
a year and a half following the ouster of Haiti’s elected government on Feb.
29, 2004, UN, OAS, and U.S. officials, in conjunction with post-coup Haitian
authorities, vetted the country’s police force – officer by officer –
integrating paramilitaries with the goal of both strengthening the force and
providing an alternative “career path”
for paramilitaries.

Hundreds
of police considered loyal to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's deposed
government were purged. Some were jailed and a few killed, according to
numerous sources interviewed.

At
the same time, former soldiers from the disbanded Haitian Armed Forces (FAdH),
who were assembled in a paramilitary “rebel”
force which worked with the country’s elite opposition to bring down Aristide,
were stationed – officially and
unofficially – in many towns across the country.

As
part of this, an extrajudicial strike brigade was assembled in Pétion-Ville. It
carried out brutal raids (sometimes alongside police), often several times a
week, in the capital’s coup-resisting neighborhoods, as documented in a
November 2004 University of Miami human rights study.

The
secret U.S. dispatches detailing the police force’s overhaul were part of 1,918
Haiti-related cables obtained by the media organization WikiLeaks and provided
to Haïti Liberté.

The
cables show that UN and U.S. officials saw the program as a useful way to
disarm and demobilize combatants, but the implications of providing coup-making
paramilitaries with government security jobs have been hidden or ignored.

The
cables also make clear that the US officials – using “redlines” and“red flags” – took on a leading role in
the “reforms,” minutely following the
process of repopulating Haiti’s police.

Millions
of dollars in funding for the demobilization and integration of the FAdH was
gathered — mainly through the UN and the U.S. — but officials also looked to
other governments for funding.

Immediately
after the coup, the integration process was carried out by officials of the
so-called Interim Government of Haiti (IGOH), under U.S., OAS and UN
supervision. Then, starting in November 2004, a longer-term apparatus, the UN’s
DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration) program, was set up. Part
of its duties included a continued integration of some of the paramilitaries
into the Haitian National Police (HNP).

The
U.S. Embassy cables go into detail about the integration of paramilitaries into
the HNP and other government agencies. One of the most revealing cables is
titled “Haiti’s Northern Ex-Military Turn
Over Weapons; Some to Enter National Police.”

The
Mar. 15, 2005 cable provides an overview of a gathering two days earlier in
Cap-Haïtien attended by Haiti’s de facto Prime
Minister Gérard Latortue and the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative
to Haiti, Juan Gabriel Valdès. The
officials oversaw a “symbolic
disarmament,” where more than “300
members of Haiti's demobilized military in Cap-Haïtien” turned in a token
seven weapons and then boarded buses to the capital.

The
UN and IGOH officials parked the paramilitaries at Port-au-Prince’s
Magistrates’ School, where many other ex-soldiers were being placed.

The
cable describes how previously high-level IGOH officials had made promises to
the ex-FAdH paramilitaries. Some “of the
ex-soldiers in Cap-Haïtien said they had been told by the PM's nephew and
security advisor Youri Latortue and the PM's political advisor Paul Magloire
that they would be admitted into the HNP,” explained the cable by U.S.
Ambassador James Foley. “This raised a
red-flag for us and the rest of the international community...”

But
at the Mar. 13 meeting, Gérard Latortue “made
clear this was not the case,” telling the paramilitaries “that integration into the HNP would be a
possibility for some, but they had to understand that not everyone would make
it into the police.Ex-soldiers not
qualified for the HNP could be hired into other public administration positions
(e.g., customs, border patrol, etc.),” Foley wrote.

But
the UN and IGOH authorities wanted to keep some of the ex-military together as
a cohesive unit prepped for integration into the police, the cable reveals. The
officials handed the matter over to UNOPS, a wing of the UN that focuses on
project management and procurement services.

Accordingly,
“UNOPS has been working to relocate both
the Managing Office [for Demobilized Military] and the approximately 80
individuals from the Magistrate's School to a former military camp in the
Carrefour neighborhood outside of Port-au-Prince,” wrote Foley. (In March
2011, the author visited an ex-FAdH-run training camp in the Carrefour area.)

UN
and U.S. officials appear to have often focused on achieving symbolic successes
like the “demobilization” of
paramilitary forces. “The symbolism of
the ex-military disarming and leaving Haiti's second-largest city represents a
significant breakthrough,” Foley concluded in his Mar. 15 cable.

At
the time, around 800 ex-military men were being housed in Port-au-Prince, with
UN help.

Of
the 400 former soldiers integrated into the police, about 200 came in 2004 from
the 15th graduating class of HNP cadets (called a “promotion” in Haiti), and 200 from the
17th promotion in 2005, the cables say.

The
number 200 was no coincidence. The
Embassy had told the IGOH that “the USG
[U.S. Government] would not support more than 200 former military being
included in Promotion 17” because “the
USG was concerned that inclusion of ex-FADH in large numbers would detract from
ongoing police reform measures; they therefore had to be closely scrutinized,”
a May 6, 2005 cable explains.

This
cable also reveals Washington’s dominance of the police force’s reconstruction.
In a meeting, the Embassy told the HNP’s chief Léon Charles that “the practice of allowing a class of people
to receive special quotas for class enrollment (as had happened with the
ex-FADH) had to end,” wrote Foley. Dutifully, “Charles agreed and stated that the practice would end immediately.”

This
did not mean that ex-soldiers wouldn’t continue to be integrated, only that “future recruitment drives would make no
distinction with regard to the former military, but would also not discriminate
against anyone for previous duty in the Haitian Armed Forces,” Charles
said, according to the cable.

An
Apr. 5, 2005 cable explains that the 16th promotion of 370 HNP
cadets included “none of [those who] had
a history of ex-FADH activity.”

In
another Mar. 15, 2005 cable entitled “DG
[Director General] Charles Update on Ex-FADH in the Haitian National Police,”
Foley outlined how the process of integration was occurring with new HNP cadet
classes.

“OAS officials charged with vetting police
candidates reported approximately 400 ex-FADH candidates at the Police Academy
on March 11 undergoing physical fitness testing,” his cable explained. The
men, who had just previously served in paramilitary squads around the country,
were vying for 200 slots in the HNP. The cable explains that a number of such
individuals had been hired in prior months.

Police
chief Charles, stated “that the ex-FADH
from the 15th class who were rushed on to the streets last fall [of 2004] would
return to class.” It was clear that officials felt somewhat worried about
the new men they were bringing into the police force, so they decided that the
ex-FAdH cadets from the 17th promotion would, upon graduation, “be deployed throughout Haiti on an
individual basis and not as a group.”

Charles
added that, among the 200 ex-FAdH in the 15th promotion, most “had been assigned to small stations in
Port-au-Prince,” adding that, “although
they were disciplined, they were older and physically slower.”

OAS
officials noted that Haitian police officials who were now assisting the OAS in
its vetting process feared some of the former soldiers they were interviewing:
“HNP personnel assisting the OAS with the
vetting program were afraid to interview some of the ex-FADH candidates out of
concern they might be targeted if the panel disqualified an applicant.”

The
U.S. embassy closely supervised how Haitian de
facto officials conducted the integration, worried about the impact of any
failures. Foley was pleased that Charles was holding ex-soldiers to “the same requirements as civilians for
entrance into the HNP,” a policy resulting from “continuous pressure from us,” he wrote in the Mar. 15 cable. But
Foley worried about “political pressures
and decisions of PM [Gérard] Latortue, Justice Minister [Bernard] Gousse, and
others,” his cable reported.

“We have raised this issue with them on
countless occasions, pointing out the real danger the IGOH runs of losing
international support for assistance to the HNP if the process of integrating
ex-FADH into the police does not hew to the redlines we have laid down,”
Foley wrote.

Embassy
officials, along with the OAS mission, would “monitor the recruitment, testing, and training process, including a
review of the written exam, test scores, and fitness results.”

Ambassador
Foley added that “the pressure to bring
ex-FADH into the HNP remains high.” He was likely referring to the calls
made by some of Haiti’s most powerful right-wing politicians and businessmen,
many having established relationships with the paramilitaries back when they
were soldiers.

Furthermore,
Chief Léon Charles was “worried that
others in the IGOH had made unrealistic promises to the ex-FADH about jobs in
the HNP in order to convince them to demobilize,” the ambassador wrote.

Charles
“fretted that the Cap-Haïtien group set
an example that others may follow, and indicated the IGOH could have over 1,000
former soldiers looking for jobs soon, including the 235 from Cap-Haïtien; 300
from Ouanaminthe; 200 from the Central Plateau; 150 from Les Cayes; 100 from
Arcahaie, and 80 from St. Marc.”

The
second Mar. 15 cable concludes “that the
USG was willing to contribute $3 million to the DDR process but could not
release the funds until the IGOH concluded an agreement with the UN on an
acceptable DDR strategy and program.”
The U.S. Embassy, playing a dominant role, was also clearly seeking to
operate in accord with a transnational policy network — U.S. officials had
helped to oversee other such integration processes in El Salvador and Iraq, and
the DDR program has been deployed in a number of other countries where UN forces
operate, such as Burundi, the Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire,
Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda,
Afghanistan, Nepal, and the Solomon Islands.

After
Charles provided information on the monitoring and processes through which the
ex-FAdH paramilitaries were integrated into the police force, Ambassador Foley
remarked in an Apr. 5, 2005 cable: “The
fleeting reply to requests for updates on human rights investigations
demonstrate the HNP's inability to perform internal investigations.”

During
their first year in office, IGOH authorities appear to have received far less
oversight in their handling of ex-FADH integration into the police. “Until now, the Interior Ministry and/or the
Managing Office [for Demobilized Soldiers] have been in charge of identifying
possible ex-FADH candidates for the HNP,” Foley wrote in one of his Mar. 15
cables. Then he made clear Washington’s oversight: “This needs to change, so that ex-FADH candidates for the police come
out of the reintegration/counseling process that the UN (with U.S. support
through the International Organization for Migration) will manage.”

While
former soldiers were being integrated into the HNP, hundreds of police who had
been loyal to Aristide’s government were fired, their names and positions
documented in a list put together by Guy Edouard, a former officer with the
Special Unit to Guard the National Palace (USGPN). In a 2006 interview, Edouard
explained that some of these former police and Palace security officers had
been "hunted down" after
the coup. Furthermore, with US support, Youri Latortue, a former USGPN officer
and Prime Minister Latortue’s security and intelligence chief, had led efforts
to "get rid of the people he did not
like," Edouard said.

Gun
battles continued to occur between the Haitian police and a handful of gangs in
the capital’s poorest slums well into 2005, and on numerous occasions, police
opened fire on peaceful anti-coup demonstrations. “April 27 was the fourth occasion since February where the HNP used
deadly force,” explained a May 6, 2005 cable. The Embassy was vexed that “despite repeated requests, we have yet to
see any objective written reports from the HNP that sufficiently articulate the
grounds for using deadly force. Equally disturbing are HNP first-hand reports
from the scene of these events. These are often confusing and irrational and
fail to meet minimum police reporting requirements.”

The
HNP, however, was working with UN forces in conducting lethal raids. Léon
Charles acknowledged that UN troops had a “standard
practice” of putting more lightly armed HNP forces in front of its units as
they moved into Cité Soleil, and this “often
resulted in the HNP overreacting and prematurely resorting to the use of deadly
force,” the May 6 cable notes.

In
a 2001 study published in the academic journal Small Wars and Insurgencies, researcher Eirin Mobekk explained in part how
the U.S. worked to integrate large numbers of former soldiers into the HNP as
Aristide, to thwart future coups, dissolved the FAdH in 1995. Washington’s
strategy was to hedge in Lavalas with the new police force.

A
decade later, this policy was resurrected. Just as Washington recycled part of
the military force that carried out the 1991 coup, it (along with the UN and the IGOH) recycled part of the paramilitary
force that carried out violence leading up to the 2004 coup.

The
WikiLeaked cables reveal just how closely Washington and the UN oversaw the
formation of Haiti’s new police and signed off on the integration of ex-FAdH
paramilitaries who had for years prior violently targeted Haiti’s popular
classes and democratically elected governments.

This reads like propaganda. Wikileaks again ‘reveals’ that the U.S government as represented by the State Department are pragmatic rational government (dictatorship) creators. They are rational -presenting the U.S in accepted role of ‘manager of ‘transition’ governments. ‘Revealing’ cables discuss paramilitaries turning over weapons… for integration…again presentation is of manager handling ‘transition’ for ‘security’: The U.S government is ‘concerned’ about detracting from police reform. So they are a concerned manager hands on in transition and interested in disarmament and police reform.

Giadominic, It appears you missed the point of the article. The purpose of the article was to point out this kind of hypocrisy and document what US embassy officials were discussing behind closed doors.